This autumn, London’s ICA will be hosting an exhibition dedicated to the notorious underground comix title, Outside Now!

Originally launched in 1964 by the now-defunct publishing house Bench Press Press, Outside, Now! featured cartoon interpretations of fact-based fights between the major comic creators of the day. As its former publisher Cornelius Numb recalls: “In those days, the comic industry was full of people from all sortsa different backgrounds. Like me, most of them started out on the bare-knuckle boxing circuit.”

Holding up a well-punched 1960s Fantastic Four comic, Numb continues: “You only got to look at a page of Jack Kirby art to see for yourself. Take a look at that bold foreshortening and tough, no-nonsense linework. Just imagine the amount of upper body strength that went into each of those pencil strokes. Now, try to imagine the kind of damage the fist clenching that pencil could do to your face. It’s no wonder we called him ‘The King’.”

According to Numb, Kirby wasn’t the only Comic Book Clobberer. “These were stand-up guys who settled things the old fashioned way. Take [Steve] Ditko: a skinny looking guy, you’re thinking, not much to look at. Stick him in a boxing ring, though, that’s a whole different story. We called him ‘Mr A’, and the ‘A’ was for ‘Ass-Kicker’. Steve really knew his mind and didn’t care much for grey areas. Every thing was black and white with him until he got you in the ring, then it all went black and blue. I watched him beat seven shades of shinola out of Carmine Infantino and Bill Everett after a Marvel vs DC baseball game turned ugly. He kept screaming: ‘Submit to my will! Submit to my will!’ He really knew how to psyche out his opponents. I read somewhere that he coached Mike Tyson for a while.

“We ran the Marvel vs DC Baseball Brawl in our double-sized 1971 Boxing Day issue. Despite their injuries, Steve, Bill and Carmine [all] worked together and hit their deadlines. Those guys were pros.”

Outside, Now! reached its peak in popularity during the 1970s, and Numb claims that mainstream comics publishers were quick to cash-in on the phenomena: “Remember that Superman vs Muhammed Ali book from ’78? I rest my case.” During the 80s, though, the magazine experienced a sharp decline in sales. A new wave of comic book artists went straight into the industry from art school or advertising. “Most of them were derivative little sons of bitches who just wanted to imitate their favourite comic artists,” recalls Numb. “Those guys didn’t know the first thing about fighting.”

“I mean no disrespect, but most of these people were fans,” says Numb bitterly. “If you ask me fans shouldn’t be making comics, they should be reading them.” By the time the 80s came around the only people in the industry who’d fight on a regular basis were the letterers. People like John Costanza, Ken Bruzenak and 2000AD’s Tom Frame tried to keep the tradition alive, but without the involvement of ‘hot’ comic artists of the day, the days of Outside, Now! were numbered.

“Those guys tried their best,” says Numb, “but what kind of chump wants to read a book that doesn’t have drawings?”

SPANNER’S GLADE, Colorado [Reuters]. When two cops arrived at the trailer park home of eccentric comics fan Dom Dukes [47], they weren’t expecting to find much. “We get these kind of anonymous tip-offs all the time,” recalls 44 year-old father of four, Sheriff Ford Foreman. “I don’t know what it is about these comics fans that gets people so suspicious. Maybe it’s those long storage boxes or the way they go to the same shop on the same day every week.”

His partner, Sheriff’s Deputy Sharon Dupree, agrees: “If I was a law-abiding American I’d be suspicious too!”

Of course, crime stats prove that the vast majority of comic-book fans aren’t criminals and dawn raids on their homes usually turn out to be fruitless. “I hate to say it,” admits Foreman, “but most of these fanboys are clean as a bell.”

“At least in the eyes of the law,” chuckles Dupree, pointing at her nose for comic effect.

“Not so sure about the nose of the law,” says Foreman, redundantly.

When Foreman and Dupree entered Dukes’ home they found a bundle of paychecks [in Britain they’re called ‘wageslips’] in an aluminum box [“aluminium”] stored in a concealed wall recess behind a poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Alyson Hannigan [‘Alison’]. The payments came from major American comic publishers and none of them were made out to Dukes.

The cops confronted their suspect: “‘Care to tell me who Frank Miller is, buddy? John Byrne? Mike McMahon from Britain’s 2000ad?’” A frightened Dukes bolted out of his trailer, but collided with a tree, fell down a ravine and was viciously attacked by a bear. During his subsequent trial, Dukes would later claim that these injuries were caused by the arresting officers, but his allegations were dismissed after he left the witness stand and collided with a tree, fell down a ravine and was attacked by a bear.

Foreman and Dupree arrested their suspect then continued searching his home. In the trailer’s bathroom unit, hidden behind a set of bookshelf-themed shower curtains, they found a fireman’s pole: “The DA said Dukes got the idea from Batman,” claims Dupree, “but I don’t know nothing about that – I’m a cop, I don’t read comics.” The pole ran through a big hole in the shower floor and descended into a vast subterranean cavern, or bath-cave. “I knew right then that we were dealing with a real sicko nutjob bastard,” said Foreman. “Don’t tell the guys at the precinct this, but I felt like that Judy Foster chick in Silence of the Lambs. I even talked like her for a while.”

In the underground lair, Foreman and Dupree found three very frightened, very bearded men. Next to them were three drawing boards.

John Byrne [68], Frank Miller [61] and Mike “Mick” McMahon [36-24-36] were comic book legends who worked on some of the industry’s most popular characters like Batman, Superman and Jugger Grimrod from the Alien Legion. According to criminal psychologist Dr Bobbi Carolgees: “[Dukes] had a very unhappy childhood [and] turned to superhero comics as a means of escape. His favourite comic artists were like surrogate father figures to him, and as a young adult regularly embarrassed himself at comic convention autograph signings by accidentally calling them ‘Daddy.’”

During the 1990s, many of Dukes’ favourite artists rebelled against the mainstream superhero comics industry and embarked on more edgy, personal projects. Dukes felt a deep sense of betrayal, no doubt exacerbated by childhood memories of his biological parents, who regularly abandoned him to embark on more edgy, personal projects.

Dukes decided to stage an elaborate intervention and make his fanboy fathers see the error of their ways. He’d do this by chaining them up in an underground lair and making them produce twenty-two pages a month of mainstream superhero “daddy issues”.

Byrne was his first victim. He met Dukes during a fishing trip to Colorado and was lured into his trailer with big talk about tax incentives and ‘creator’s rights’: “You know, people say to me: ‘John, how could you have been so naïve?’ But let me tell you this: the people who say this did not work in the comics industry during the late-1990s. Back then, this sort of thing used to happen to illustrious, Eagle Award winning comic professionals all the time. I’m just unlucky that it resulted in a 20-year kidnapping ordeal.”

British artist McMahon was Dukes’ next victim: “Well, to tell you the truth, like a lot of people at the time, I was getting rather disillusioned with the UK comics scene and was quite keen on diversifying into other fields and suchlike. Then one day I got a fax from this General Dukes bloke who wanted me to work for the Pentagon. Apparently, the US Military were launching a new range of combat footwear inspired by my drawings. I thought to myself: ‘Bostin! This is just the sort of career change I was after!’”

Miller met Dukes during a signing tour for the audio-book adaptation of his comic series, Hard Boiled. “The lying weasel told me he was Mayor of Denver, said he wanted a giant anti-censorship mural for the local Amtrak station. Spent weeks planning it out: 60 foot by 30 foot, with Marv from Sin City in the middle, gaffa tape all over his mouth. Went ‘round to Dukes’ trailer to collect the tiles, next thing you know I’m chained to the floor of a dungeon with John-goddamn-Byrne and some Limey who draws bigger feet than I do!”

During their years of captivity, the artists were forced to produce the sort of comics that Dukes enjoyed as a child. “I was working on a Spider-Man strip in the dungeon one day,” recalls Byrne, “and I thought to myself: Hey – wouldn’t it be fun to do a ‘Day in the Life of Aunt May’ yarn? I know what you’re thinking – and you’re right! It’s one of those crazy ideas that only an illustrious, Eagle Award winning comic professional could come up with! When Dukes inspected the artwork he wanted to know where Spider-Man was and who he was supposed to be fighting. ‘That’s just it, old buddy!’ I said, ‘There’s no Spidey! There’s no supervillain! It’s just Aunt May all the way!’”

“Well, I worked with some risk-averse editors in the past, but this Dukes guy was something else! He smacked me across the eyes and beard with a rolled-up copy of Previews magazine and withheld my Hostess Twinkie bar rations for a week – believe me, friend: that was a bad day in the dungeon! You can rest assured it was the last time I tried to do anything exciting or innovative in comics.”

The artists had to endure working conditions that have since been condemned by Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Comic Code Authority: “It was bad enough being half-starved and chained to the floor of a dungeon,” recalls McMahon, “but this Dukes chap made sure our drawing boards were always just out of arm’s reach. He thought we might use them to escape. I must admit, Frank, John and myself did think about making a break for it on numerous occasions, but none of our plans ever got off the drawing board.”

To produce comics pages under these conditions the artists had to improvise. “We used to share a six-foot long bamboo rod with a bingo pen taped to the end,” claims Byrne. “Let me tell you: our linework was all over the place!”

Miller agrees. Holding up some of the comics he produced during captivity he snarls: “Look at this shit! Look what that sick psycho bastard made me do! I don’t know about you, but when I look at this, you know what I think? I’ll tell you what I think: I think it looks like it was done by a guy chained to the bottom of a f*****g dungeon using a f*****g bingo pen taped to the end of a six-foot long bamboo f*****g rod, that’s what I think.”

“Just a pity no one else had the balls to say that – we might have got busted out a whole lot sooner.”

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https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699059/0/tomlennon~Comics-Secret-History-Toxic-Fandom/feed/0https://www.tomlennon.com/blade-runner-the-cyberpunk-nexus/Blade Runner: The Cyberpunk Nexushttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699065/0/tomlennon~Blade-Runner-The-Cyberpunk-Nexus/
https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699065/0/tomlennon~Blade-Runner-The-Cyberpunk-Nexus/#respondMon, 16 Jul 2018 22:58:46 +0000https://tomlennon.com/?p=5984I've contributed an essay about the film Blade Runner to a new book called The Cyberpunk Nexus: Exploring the Blade Runner Universe

I’ve written a big ol’ 6,000 word essay entitled Metal Machine Movies: The Lasting Influence of Heavy Metal and Métal Hurlant on Blade Runner and the Science Fiction Cinema of Ridley Scott for a rather terrific new book entitled The Cyberpunk Nexus: Exploring the Blade Runner Universe. It features a veritable plethora of insightful essays about the original Blade Runner movie and its sequel, Blade Runner: 2049. If, like me, you love these films then the book is essential reading.

In 1982, a new benchmark was set for science-fiction film with the release of Blade Runner. Based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by the acclaimed novelist Philip K. Dick and directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner was a visual and philosophical tour-de-force, set in a dystopian future in which artificially intelligent replicants, nearly indistinguishable from humans, are hunted down by police-operatives known as Blade Runners. Featuring the talents of Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, and Darryl Hannah, the film tackled numerous themes and birthed controversies that have been poured over by fans and critics ever since. Blade Runner has also inspired literary and comic-book spin-offs, and a cinematic sequel released in 2017.

The Cyberpunk Nexus: Exploring the Blade Runner Universe examines the entire Blade Runner saga, from the original novel to its numerous film iterations. The book features a foreword by Paul M. Sammon (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner). Essayists include Bryce Carlson (of BOOM! Comics’ Sheep adaptation), Paul J. Salamoff, Robert Meyer Burnett, Rich Handley, Zaki Hasan, Julian Darius, and many others, with a cover by popular artist Matt Busch.

Most of us have had a bad job at some point in our lives. Often we’ll just chalk it up to experience, but occasionally more drastic action is required. CVs may need to be sanitized and résumé entries redacted, taking care not to arouse the suspicions of future employers with tell-tale gaps in the timeline and an abundance of thick black horizontal lines. Sometimes, though, even this isn’t enough. Every once in a while a job comes along that is so bad, so weird, so wrong in every conceivable way that no amount of judicious pruning of the past can lessen its damage.

This is my bad, weird, and wrong in every conceivable way job story.

Just over a decade ago I got a call from my friend and former boss, Chris. We’d both recently been made redundant from a big financial services firm where we’d worked together for many years. He’d just got a job managing a sales team at a new publishing business and wanted me on board: ‘I know sales isn’t really your thing,’ he said, ‘but it’d be fun to work together again.’

He was right, but it’d be more than just fun: this would be like a dream come true. As a young graduate I’d sent my CV to dozens of publishing houses in London, but never managed to get so much as a toe in the door. Sure, working on a sales team wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but it was a start. ‘What sort of books do they publish?’ I asked.

‘Phone books,’ said Chris.

This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, either.

Chris told me that a young entrepreneurial hotshot saw a gap in the market and was launching a brand new business-to-business telephone directory. ‘Really?’ I asked, genuinely intrigued. ‘With paper and pages and stuff?’ I didn’t want to question the business savvy of an entrepreneurial hotshot, but this seemed like a rather odd choice of venture to embark on during the first decade of the twenty-first century. More and more businesses were migrating online, and this was especially true of phone books: even a casual observer could see that the Yellow Pages was well on its way to becoming a Yellow Page.

Despite these misgivings, I still needed a job so accepted the offer. Chris asked if I could start a few days early to help set up our new office and I was happy to oblige. Up until then I’d only ever worked at big, established companies, so the idea of being present at the birth of a business kind of excited me. I even brought along some cigars.

On my first day at work I met the entire workforce (all five of them), and as we were getting to know each other a young man wandered into the office. He looked about 12 and was wearing one of those suit and collarless shirt combos that I’ve never really understood. I assumed it was just some random kid who’d been forced to dress up for a wedding.

‘Good morning, Ed,’ said Chris to the new arrival. ‘I’ve just been introducing Tom to the team.’

Good God, I thought, my new boss is a child! Chris said he was young, but I wasn’t expecting this.

The young man grasped my hand and shook it firmly. ‘Welcome to the Business Book’, he said. ‘I’m the managing director, Edward Elgar.’

‘Elgar?’ I blurted out. ‘As in the composer?’

I froze. Oh no, I thought, I’ve done it again. Another terrible first impression. He must have heard that thousands of times. He’ll think I’m an idiot.

This awkward meet and greet was mercifully interrupted by a commotion outside. ‘Edward!’ a woman’s voice bellowed. ‘Your father needs a hand out here with these boxes.’

Edward’s mum and dad were in the car park, unloading the boot of their vintage Bentley. His mother was a large woman in her late-fifties who wore a fashionable floral dress which clashed somewhat with the enormous silver crucifix hanging from her neck. The combined effect was like a strange mash-up of Hattie Jacques and Professor van Helsing. His father was much older than I’d have expected, and I found myself doing some quick mental parental arithmetic: based on his age, posture and clipped mannerisms I was able to deduce that he’d probably seen action during World War II, although the massive veteran’s badge on his blazer was another big clue.

So this is what a family business looks like, I thought.

After we carried the boxes into the office, Edward invited me to join him in the conference room so he could get my formal induction out of the way. He opened with a question: ‘Tom, how old do you think I am?’

It was an odd choice of ice-breaker, and I didn’t know what to say. I felt I was being manoeuvred into a trap. ‘Um,’ I said.

‘Seriously, how old do you think I am?’

‘Um.’

‘I bet you think I’m 17 or 18!’

Bloody Hell, I didn’t even think he was that old! ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not very good at guessing people’s ages.’

‘Come on,’ he said, giggling now. ‘Higher or lower than 20?’

What’s this, I thought, Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right? He can’t be old enough to remember that!

‘Um,’ I said. ‘Higher… maybe?’

‘That’s right!’ he said, ‘I’m 21!’ Apparently, looking so young had been a bit of a professional hindrance for Edward. For one thing, he had to avoid business meetings in licensed premises in case he got ID’d. ‘That would compromise my credibility,’ he said in earnest.

I was never one to hang out with hotshot entrepreneur types (especially ones who looked like they should be choosing their GCSE options), but it soon became clear that they were the sort of people who really, really liked to talk about themselves. This came as a bit of a relief as it minimised my chances of blurting out another faux pas.

Edward had a background in recruitment, and was the founder of what he described as ‘the region’s leading senior management placement specialists’. His mum and dad (who he preferred to call ‘The Directors’) had recently moved into the area after spending several years overseas, and were temporarily living in his flat (sorry, ‘spacious executive apartment’). They were helping Edward set up his start-up, although this wasn’t his first foray into the murky world of business-to-business telephone directories. He’d recently tried to launch a similar publication to be managed by his ‘beautiful ex-model girlfriend’ (his phrase), but she broke his heart, organised a staff mutiny, and set up a rival telephone directory business like some kind of heartless phone fatale.

By the end of the induction session I learned a lot about my new boss, but had no idea on where to find the nearest fire exit.

Things were about to get weird. The next morning, a very serious-looking Hattie marched up to my desk: ‘I’d like to have a word in private, please.’ Uh oh, I thought, this can’t be good. Hattie sat across from me in the conference room, looked me straight in the eye and asked a question that will probably haunt me for the rest of my days. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you believe in the Holy Spirit?’

I didn’t see that coming, appropriately enough.

What could I say? Should I fess up and tell the truth, admit that I’m just a lapsed Irish Catholic struggling to find the right kind of parking spot along the agnostic highway? On second thoughts, I’d just got a new job, this was the mother of my new boss, and she’s wearing an immense silver crucifix. I decided to play it safe.

I was taken aback, and a little offended. My job didn’t officially start until the following Monday. You’d think my new employers would be grateful I arrived a few days early to help set the place up instead of prejudging my sales potential. They’d not even given me the chance to show them how crap I was.

And that’s when the conversation took yet another unexpected turn. Hattie’s features softened and she smiled: ‘I get messages from the Holy Spirit, Tom, and the Holy Spirit tells me that you’ll make a perfect Editorial and Research Manager.’

I didn’t see that coming, either.

I spent the rest of the day trying to process my Immaculate Promotion. After years of climbing the greasy pole the old-fashioned way, in the end all it took was a good reference from Heavenly HR. That sort of thing’s only supposed to happen to people like Moses.

It’s fair to say that Hattie and Edward were, to put it mildly, a tad eccentric. She was willing to promote a complete stranger based on voices in her head, while he displayed a penchant for self-aggrandisement that would make a contestant on The Apprentice blush. I still held out hope for The Major, though. He was a veteran of WW2, and I’ve always felt an innate sense of respect towards members of The Greatest Generation. One day, the radio was on in the office and there was a news report about some natural disaster. The Major said grumpily: ‘This wouldn’t have happened if Hitler won the war.’

Oh God, I thought, not him as well.

As a newly-minted manager I got to sit in on management meetings, and it soon became clear that Edward and his parents – sorry, The Directors – hadn’t really thought this whole thing through. During the first meeting we reviewed a mock-up of the cover, which featured a nice big photograph of the Rotunda. The plan was to launch a Midlands edition before gradually expanding nationwide, which seemed fairly sensible to me until I asked the Elgar clan to clarify what they meant by ‘the Midlands’. What they meant was absolutely everything in England between Yorkshire and the M25. ‘In that case,’ I said, trying to be helpful, ‘maybe having The Rotunda on the front cover isn’t such a good idea. That’d be a tough sell in the Home Counties’.

I was beginning to have serious doubts as to whether Edward was quite as business savvy as he repeatedly made himself out to be. One day he was getting ready for an appointment with his bank manager to discuss a loan for the company, and – just to make conversation – I casually reminded him to remember to bring his business plan.

‘Do you think I’ll need my business plan?’ he said, looking panicked.

‘Yes, Edward,’ I replied. ‘I think you’ll need your business plan.’

‘Could you make me one? I’ll need it in ten minutes’

At some stage we were going to have to pay to get these phone books printed. Edward said that the printing costs would come out of the profits raised from selling advertising space up front, but unfortunately he hadn’t gotten around to budgeting for this. Chris and I made some phone calls, got some quotes and ran them past Edward. He went pale, locked himself in the conference room and screamed. When he eventually calmed down, he called an emergency staff meeting and announced our new strategy: ‘We’ll only be printing copies for people who have bought advertising space.’

To put it another way, he’d just invented the world’s first vanity phone book.

Money was becoming a big problem. The sales team were doing their best, but potential customers were understandably reluctant to commit their advertising spend on a phone book that didn’t exist. Edward’s solution? He wrote a cold-calling script that described our product as ‘the UK’s number one business directory.’

Chris was furious: ‘You can’t say that something’s number one when it doesn’t exist yet!’

‘Yes we can!’ said Edward, defiantly. He jabbed his forefinger repeatedly against the side of his head. ‘In my mind we are number one.’

This wasn’t very reassuring.

Weeks went by, and a continued lack of advertising revenue suggested that businesses located between Yorkshire and the M25 were unimpressed with Edward’s powers of positive thinking. Almost every day he’d come up with a new hare-brained scheme to supercharge the business, and almost every day Chris and I would make some phone calls and tell Edward how much that idea would cost to implement. Edward would go pale, lock himself in the conference room and scream.

His behaviour became increasingly erratic. He was no stranger to gilding the lily, but now his tales of self-aggrandizement were becoming increasingly preposterous. He’d frequently boast about having a black belt in karate, and that when he left his home town his sensei wept ‘for he had nothing more to teach me’. He’d reminisce about a part-time job he’d had as a teenager at ‘the UK’s number one sports retail chain’ (not just at any old branch, of course, but ‘their flagship store’), where he swiftly rose to the rank of assistant manager despite only working on Saturdays. One day, his boss was being threatened by an angry customer who was presumably unhappy with the cut of his gym sock.

‘Let me deal with this,’ said Edward.

‘No, Edward, don’t!’ his boss pleaded. ‘The deputy manager of a flagship store can’t get into a fight with a customer – it’s against company policy!’

‘Then I resign!’ he declared, before incapacitating the assailant with a traditional roundhouse kick.

One Monday morning Edward made an announcement. He told us that he’d had a meeting with The Directors over the weekend (translation: he was having dinner at home with his mum and dad) and they’d unanimously decided that publishing a printed directory was no longer viable. Instead, they would launch an internet search engine.

‘That should keep the printing costs down,’ said the Major, unhelpfully.

‘What’s our target market?’ I asked. I was no entrepreneurial hotshot, but it seemed like a reasonable question.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Edward.

I was beginning to lose my patience. ‘Edward, if you’re going to set up a search engine, then we’ve presumably got to do something the other very successful search engines don’t already do. So what’s going to makes us different? Who are we aiming this at?’

‘It’s for everybody!’ cried Edward, enthusiastically.

‘You mean like Google?’

‘Yes!’ he said, emphatically. ‘But better than Google!’

Gregg, a lovely chap who was our entire IT department, stepped up to the plate: ‘Edward, are you serious?’

‘Yes I am!’ growled Edward, angrily. He jabbed his forefinger repeatedly against the side of his head and cried: ‘In my mind we’re better than Google!’

In the weeks that followed, it soon became apparent that a young entrepreneur, his parental directorate and their small but increasingly-bewildered workforce were no match for Silicon Valley’s finest. Edward was telling the sales team to promote our site as ‘the UK’s number one search engine’ – which, of course, could immediately be disproven by Googling us.

Every day the bank would phone wanting to speak to Edward, who would invariably gesticulate wildly while silently mouthing the words ‘I’m not in!’ This, I’ve subsequently learned, is never a good sign.

One Monday morning I arrived in the office, and had a quick post-weekend catch up with my colleagues. Salesman Dan had bumped into an old school friend who had gone into business as a corporate locksmith in Glasgow. ‘He’s making an absolute fortune,’ said Dan.

Edward’s head popped up from behind his monitor. The very next day he called an emergency staff meeting and announced our new strategy: we were abandoning the search engine business and becoming a locksmiths’ college.

Edward said he’d been networking with someone close to then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who ‘could pretty much guarantee us’ unlimited government funding for teaching people how to make keys and fix locks and stuff. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down too well amongst his employees. As the only person in the room who’d been promoted by the Holy Spirit, I felt a moral duty to take a stand: ‘Edward, this is insane! How in the name of Harry Bastard Houdini are we going to train locksmiths?’

Edward started raising his forefinger to the side of his head, but his mother interrupted. ‘I’ll deal with this, Edward.’ She scowled at me, and – in the most patronising voice I’ll probably ever hear – said: ‘It’s quite obvious: all we need are some premises, a few tools, and a piece of wood, roughly door-shaped.’

And that was it. Not a door, but something ‘roughly door shaped’. Presumably she had in mind some piece of wood that starts off, say, baby grand piano-shaped before seamlessly transitioning into something a bit more recognisably door.

Unsurprisingly, the company folded soon after this, with Edward owing us salary that never got paid. Still, this narcissistic blowhard with his Walter Mitty complex had one last deranged scheme up his sleeve. On what turned out to be our last day in the office, he took Chris, me and a couple of other male colleagues to one side and pitched us the opportunity to invest in a new website he was going to launch. This time it wasn’t a Google-killing search engine, but something a bit more saucy.

‘But please,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t tell The Directors.’

I’ve tried to recreate these events and conversations based on my memories of them. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, and because I don’t want to hear from these mad bastards ever again.

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https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699071/0/tomlennon~The-Odd-Job/feed/0https://www.tomlennon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/odd-job-tom-lennon-birmingham-featured-image-3-301x201.jpghttps://www.tomlennon.com/metal-hurlant-the-french-comic-that-changed-the-world/Métal Hurlant: the French comic that changed the worldhttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699075/0/tomlennon~M%c3%a9tal-Hurlant-the-French-comic-that-changed-the-world/
https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699075/0/tomlennon~M%c3%a9tal-Hurlant-the-French-comic-that-changed-the-world/#commentsTue, 02 Aug 2016 22:49:29 +0000http://tomlennon.com/?p=5217Some comics are defined as ‘classics’, while others are regarded as innovative titles years ahead of their time. Then there’s Métal Hurlant, possibly the most influential comic ever published...

Some comics are defined as ‘classics’, while others are regarded as influential, innovative titles years ahead of their time. Then there’s Métal Hurlant.

A SURLY, weather-beaten warrior glides over a bizarre landscape, slouched on the back of a grey pterodactyl… an interstellar anti-hero battles Lovecraftian demons through space and time… an incongruous adventurer in pith helmet and khaki tries to save the three-levelled world that he himself created…

Arzach by Moebius

Between 1975 and 1987, the French science fiction anthology magazine Métal Hurlant (‘Screaming Metal’ in English) published the maddest, weirdest and most breathtakingly gorgeous comics the world had ever seen. A list of its contributors reads like a roll call of the industry’s finest talent: Jean (Moebius) Giraud, Philippe Druillet, Jacques Tardi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, Hugo Pratt, Jean-Claude Gal, Richard Corben and Milo Manara either made their name, consolidated their reputation or completely reinvented themselves within its pages. More than any other publication, it transformed a lowly, juvenile medium into a vibrant ‘ninth art’ and – to this day – continues to exert a powerful influence on the world of comics and beyond.

The magazine was launched in January 1975 as the flagship title of Les Humanoïdes Associés, a French publishing venture set up by Euro comic veterans Moebius, Druillet and Jean-Pierre Dionnet, together with their finance director Bernard Farkas. Influenced by both the American underground comix scene of the 1960s and the political and cultural upheavals of that decade, their goal was bold and grandiose: they were going to kick ass, take names, and make people take comics seriously.

With an emphasis on avant-garde storytelling and Gallic satire, Métal Hurlant was characterized by artistic innovation at every level. In the beige comics world of the 1970s – where cheap, pulpy newsprint was still the industry standard – Métal Hurlant arrived printed on ‘bedsheet’ sized, high grade paper stock, giving its illustrators the freedom to create visually stunning, often lavishly painted artwork that seemed to almost explode from the page. Robert Crumb and his underground cohorts might have influenced them, but these Humanoids were clearly not content with making do with underground production values.

It wasn’t just the look of the magazine that was different. The creators, freed from the editorial constraints of traditional comic publishers, were encouraged by editor Dionnet to take risks and push their art into new and unchartered territories. Like the underground titles before them, they didn’t shy away from adult themes, but – more often than not – these elements were shot through with a rich vein of humour and delivered with a narrative sophistication previously unseen in the medium.

This approach was typified by an artist who, more than any other, has become synonymous with Métal Hurlant. Jean Giraud (1938-2012) was a successful comic artist who, under the pen name ‘Gir’, was best known as the co-creator of the popular Western series, Blueberry. By the mid-1970s, Giraud was feeling increasingly constrained by the conventions of the western genre, so decided to revive a long-dormant pseudonym to embark on more experimental work. As ‘Moebius’, Giraud not only worked in a different genre to ‘Gir’ – a deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic form of science fiction and fantasy – but his art looked like it was drawn by a completely different person. Where Gir’s brushwork evoked the mythical Old West of John Ford movies, Moebius’s preferred tool was the pen, and with it he created entire universes that were quite unlike anything that had been seen in comics – or, for that matter, in any other medium.

Two of Moebius’s most famous and enduring characters made their debut in early issues of Métal Hurlant. Arzach was a grumpy-looking warrior who explored a strange, desolate landscape on the back of a pterodactyl-like creature in a series of ‘silent’ vignettes. Major Grubert, by contrast, was a pith-helmeted space adventurer – a sort of interstellar Allan Quatermain – whose increasingly unpredictable escapades within the asteroid-encased pocket universes he protected would collectively become known as The Airtight Garage.

Métal Hurlant Gallery: Moebius

Arzach

Approaching Centauri

The Airtight Garage

Shore Leave on Pharagonesia

The Incal

The Airtight Garage
Grubert

As well as these major signature works, Moebius would go on to produce an abundance of classic short stories for the magazine like The Long Tomorrow (his future-noir collaboration with screenwriter Dan O’Bannon) as well as lengthier works like the hugely-influential Incal series (written by cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky). The very first story to appear in Métal Hurlant – a six-page sci-fi yarn by Moebius and Philippe Druillet entitled Approaching Centauri – typified the spirit of bold experimentation that would come to characterise both the artist and the magazine. As Moebius later recalled:

‘My intention was to see if I could express the same quality of nightmarish visions that always seemed to come so naturally to Philippe. I even used the same extra-large format of paper that he uses for drawing his stories. At the same time, I wanted to retain my own style, and not copy him. In fact, I had the art of French illustrator Gustave Doré in mind when I started drawing the story’.

Moebius wasn’t the only comic artist breaking new ground in Métal Hurlant. His fellow Humanoids co-founders Dionnet and Druillet produced some of their finest work for the magazine. Dionnet wrote Exterminator 17 (a terrific, cyberpunk-anticipating future war series featuring luscious artwork from Enki Bilal) and the heroic fantasy epic Conquering Armies with Jean-Claude Gal. Druillet, meanwhile, took his already weird-yet-compelling linework to new levels of deranged, Baroque brilliance in stories like La Nuit (‘The Night’, 1976). He also revived his classic, dimension-hopping antihero Lone Sloane in the serial Gail (1975-76), and produced a somewhat loose, totally mad, yet utterly mesmerising adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel, Salammbô (1980).

Métal Hurlant had become a melting pot of artistic innovation. The magazine played a pivotal role in the development of the influential retro-modernist Atom Style of comic illustration, publishing early work by pioneers of the technique like Yves Chaland, Joost Swarte, Serge Clerc and Ted Boinet. It serialized French translations of classic material from other countries (including Belgian post-apocalyptic epic Jeremiah and Britain’s own Judge Dredd) and published lengthy articles championing the work of fantasy artists from outside the comics field such as H.R. Giger and Chris Foss.

Like all pioneers, they didn’t always get it right. Some of Métal Hurlant’s bandes dessinées (‘drawn strips’ – the French term for comics) were overly self-indulgent, while others haven’t aged particularly well. Richard Corben’s fantasy hero Den, for instance – a sort of testosterone-charged mashup of pulp hero John Carter and porn star John Holmes – now reads like the fever dream of a deeply misogynistic nerd. Still, the magazine’s overall artistry and defiant risk-taking agenda inspired rival publishers to up their game, and it wasn’t long before other ‘Bandes Dessinées Pour Adultes’ titles hit the Franco-Belgian spinner racks, including Fluide Glacial and À Suivre. In 1977, Les Humanoïdes Associés themselves produced a ‘sister’ publication entitled Ah! Nana, devoted almost exclusively to female comic creators like Chantal Montellier. Similar titles also began to appear in other European countries – like Spain’s Metropol and Italy’s Frigidaire – often featuring translations of Métal Hurlant strips, while in the UK the magazine was a major inspiration behind the classic anthology comics 2000ad and Warrior.

More than a decade before the likes of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns led to a spate of ‘Bam, Pow: comics aren’t just for kids any more’ headlines in the English-speaking press, Métal Hurlant was boldly asserting the medium’s maturity. In France, an ‘auteur’ system rapidly developed, with comic creators earning the same kind of cultural esteem as novelists and film directors. Inspired by the legendary highbrow film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, a ‘Cahiers de la Bandes Dessinées’ was launched, subjecting comics to similar levels of intellectual scrutiny (and, some would say, pomposity). University courses dedicated to the subject soon sprang up, and even the French government acknowledged comics newfound legitimacy by bankrolling the huge national comic strip museum in the town of Angoulême. By the time the former President François Mitterand confessed he was an avid comic reader in 1985, the French considered it no more controversial or eccentric than admitting a fondness for opera, jazz or the films of Jerry Lewis.

The protagonist awakens to find himself transformed into a muscular giant in a strange, savage world full of dragons, manbeasts and women of ample proportions…

English-speaking comic fans were also becoming increasingly aware of Métal Hurlant. Even those lacking French language fluency were still quite happy to savour the eye-popping artwork, although the nudity probably helped. The publishers of American satire magazine National Lampoon saw a potential for exploiting this new adult comics market and, in 1977, published Heavy Metal magazine, which – during its early years, at least – devoted itself almost exclusively to translated reprints from Métal Hurlant. Still published to this day, with Glaswegian A-list comics writer Grant Morrison as its recently appointed Editor-in-Chief, Heavy Metal remains a time-honoured gateway drug to the European comics scene.

‘Before the publication of Heavy Metal, [Les Humanoïdes Associés] came to Marvel seeking an American publisher. After they did their presentation, we had a talk and [Stan Lee] thought that the stuff was too violent, too sexy and that good ol’ sanitized Marvel couldn’t do that.’

Heavy Metal’s success was enough to encourage a change of policy, however. In 1980 Marvel launched Epic Illustrated, which – whilst toning down the sexual and satirical content to broaden its appeal – was published in a similar format to the illustrious French original. Uneven but occasionally brilliant, it featured stunning work from the likes of Frank Frazetta and Hurlant regular Richard Corben. Ironically enough, in the late-1980s Stan Lee collaborated with Moebius on a Silver Surfer comic, and Marvel’s Epic imprint released a series of Moebius graphic novels featuring the same Métal Hurlant material that he’d previously felt was a bit too much for his ‘True Believers’.

Métal Hurlant’s impact on comics:

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Epic Illustrated

In 1981, Marvel Comics got on the adult comic bandwagon with Epic Illustrated

Heavy Metal

Long-running fantasy magazine Heavy Metal was an attempt at replicating the Métal Hurlant formula for an American market

Pilote

The success of Métal Hurlant meant that even traditional Franco-Belgian comics like Pilote started aiming at a more mature audience

A Suivre

Métal Hurlant's success paved the way for other Franco-Belgian adult comics. One of the best of these was A Suivre.

Sadly, the irony didn’t stop there. Back in France things weren’t going well for Métal Hurlant. The magazine was no stranger to financial difficulties (hardly surprising given the fact it was originally set up by three visionary iconoclasts and a token businessman), but by the mid-1980s sales sharply declined as rival publications pandered to the lowest common denominator, sacrificing Hurlant’s artistic experimentation in favour of an airbrushed excess of swords and sauciness. In 1985, publishers Hachette acquired the title and Dionnet was promptly replaced as editor. A year later it changed hands again, but by this time, the magazine was a pale imitation of its former self. In August 1987 – just as headlines about comics growing up started appearing in the British and American press – Métal Hurlant folded.

The magazine was briefly revived in 2002 as Franco-US co-production, and more recently some of its stories were adapted into a TV anthology series entitled Métal HurlantChronicles. During its original twelve year run, Métal Hurlant did more than any other publication to promote comics as a legitimate artform. It not only left us with a formidable back catalogue of timeless material, but it became a template for all subsequent attempts at ‘serious’ comics, encouraged writers and artists to aim higher and strive for artistic originality, and even pioneered the system of releasing collected volumes of comic strips that we take for granted today.

A private eye and his beautiful client make love. The phone rings. It’s a robocop, and it knows who the Arcturian spy is: “It’s the girl!” Suddenly, she changes…

When Métal Hurlant first appeared in 1975, it must have seemed like a crazy idea. Here was an expensively-produced science fiction magazine coming out at a time when science fiction was anything but fashionable. Nowhere was this more evident than at the local cinema, and while the early-70s produced an occasional genre movie classic like Silent Running (1972), most sci-fi films of the period were dour, dystopian, low budget affairs. This was the era of the New Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, filmmakers more interested in gritty realism than spaceships and bug-eyed monsters. Métal Hurlant had arrived at a time when mainstream cinema was more interested in the gutter than the stars.

All that changed in 1977. Star Wars was a global sensation that made sci-fi a permanent fixture at the box office. To audiences of the time, this epic space fantasy with its state-of-the-art visual effects looked like nothing they’d ever seen before.

To readers of Métal Hurlant, however, it all looked a bit familiar.

The cluttered, lived-in backdrop of this galaxy far, far away might have looked like it was a dozen parsecs away from the clean, white plastic-panelled corridors of previous sci-fi movies, but this grungy aesthetic was commonplace in the pages of Métal Hurlant. Darth Vader and the Empire, with its penchant for enormous, visually impressive yet somewhat impractical weaponry, evoked the works of Philippe Druillet, while farmboy hero Luke Skywalker’s inhospitable desert homeworld, Tatooine – with its junkshop tech and strange skeletal creatures half-buried in the sand – looked like an Airtight Garage strip by Moebius brought to life.

Métal Hurlant and Star Wars

Never Ending Fight Against the Darkness by Enki Bilal
From Star Wars Visions (Acme Archives, 2010)

Director George Lucas made no secret of the connections between Star Wars and Métal Hurlant. He namechecked both Druillet and Moebius in a 1979 interview, wrote introductions to collections of their comic art, and even hired Moebius as a conceptual artist for his late-80s fantasy film, Willow. In fact, a background detail from Moebius’s The Long Tomorrow would later appear as the Imperial Probe Droid in the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

To be fair, Métal Hurlant was just one of a multitude of sources that influenced George Lucas, and it wasn’t even the only Franco-Belgian comic: the Valérian saga by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières (1967-2010) contains many sequences that bear an uncannily similarity to iconic scenes that would later appear in Star Wars films. By opening the door to big budget science fiction blockbusters, however, Star Wars paved the way for other filmmakers to channel the Métal Hurlant influence even more directly. The Mad Max films of Australian director George Miller – including last year’s Fury Road – all owe a huge debt to Métal Hurlant strips like Druillet’s Salammbô and Jeremiah by Hermann Huppen. The original Mad Max logo even appears to be a homage to the magazine, right down to its dual lightning bolt backdrop.

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Mad Max and Arzach

Ridley Scott – director of two of the most influential science fiction films of all time, Alien and Blade Runner – was quite open about the debt he owed the magazine. In an interview published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Alien, he said:

‘In 1977, I came across the comics and publications born out of the Métal Hurlant magazines. In the same year, I was offered Alien, and I recognised the […] influences I could apply to the visual aspects of the film.’

Scott hired Moebius and fellow artists H.R. Giger and Chris Foss (who had both been profiled in Métal Hurlant) to work as conceptual artists on the film, and the Giger-designed alien ‘xenomorph’ remains one of cinema’s most disturbing creations. For Blade Runner, the director turned to Moebius’s aforementioned The Long Tomorrow story and the works of Hurlant regular Enki Bilal to inform his seminal vision of a future Los Angeles. More recently, Scott revisited The Long Tomorrow and other Moebius stories as visual inspiration for his Alien prequel, Prometheus.

Slideshow: Métal Hurlant impact on Movies

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Arzach (1976)

The Night (1976) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max and Metal Hurlant

Two logos separated at birth?

The Long Tomorrow (1976) and Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The Long Tomorrow (1976) and Blade Runner (1982)

The Long Tomorrow (1976)

And it wasn’t just Hollywood. In Japan, the artist and filmmaker Katsuhiro Otomo cited Métal Hurlant as an influence on his classic manga and anime film, Akira, while Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki took inspiration from Moebius’s Arzach when creating his classic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Moebius and Miyazaki became close friends and mutual influences: Moebius named his daughter Nausicaä, and in 2005 the artists’ work appeared together in a joint exhibition in Paris.

A decade after it originally ceased publication, the magazine’s legacy returned home. Luc Besson’s 1997 French sci-fi film The Fifth Element may have divided critics, but no one could deny it was bold, visually unique, and one of cinema’s weirdest summer blockbusters. It was also Besson’s love letter to the Métal Hurlant school of comics. Based on a story he started writing at the age of sixteen ( in 1975, the year the magazine was launched), it featured production designs by Hurlant alumni Moebius and Jean-Claude Mézières, and remains one of the most expensive works of fan fiction ever made. More recently, Besson returned to the world of French sci-fi comics with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, his big budget adaptation of the classic Star Wars-influencing series by Mézières and Pierre Christin.

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Filmmakers weren’t the only people indebted to Métal Hurlant. In a 1992 interview, author William Gibson – known as ‘the Godfather of Cyberpunk‘ – remembered a lunch date with Ridley Scott where they discussed their common influences and ‘were both very clear about our debt to the Métal Hurlant school of the 70s.’

In an introduction to the comics adaptation of his novel Neuromancer, Gibson elaborated on this:

‘So it’s entirely fair to say that the way Neuromancer-the novel “looks” was influenced by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume this must also be true of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York […] and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed “cyberpunk”. Those French guys, they got their end in early!’

These movies and books have effectively channelled the vision and artistry of Métal Hurlant to a global audience, many of whom probably wouldn’t dream of reading a science fiction comic, let alone a saucy French one from the 70s. Star Wars, Mad Max, Alien, Blade Runner – the animated odysseys of Studio Ghibli and the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson – have all inspired countless imitators of their own. These fictional landscapes have been absorbed into our collective imaginations, manifesting themselves in the unlikeliest of places – from music to video games, from the hi-tech exoskeletal excess of the Lloyds Building in London the off-the-shelf Futurist garments so ubiquitous on fashion catwalks – and, ultimately, all of this can be traced back to Métal Hurlant.

Like it or not, we are all Humanoids now.

This is a significantly updated and expanded version of an article that originally appeared in comics magazine Borderline.

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I used to work with a guy who didn’t like Bruce Springsteen. He’d often taunt me, saying cruel things like ‘Do you know that Bruce Springsteen says “Born in the USA” in the song Born in the USA more than 87 times?’ This particular allegation was delivered with a self-satisfied smirk that positively reeked of pedantic bastard, and even though it wasn’t true (I checked), that didn’t stop him from saying the same damn thing to me on more than 87 occasions.

I’m going to see Bruce Springsteen at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena tonight. I’ve seen many great rock performers over the years – Bowie, Dylan, Tom Waits, the Rolling Stones – but there’s nothing quite like a Springsteen show. He really is the best there is at what he does.

But, damn it, if he does play Born in the USA tonight then I know I’m going to end up counting. And that’s because I used to work with a guy who didn’t like Bruce Springsteen.

Marvel’s Daredevil returns to Netflix-subscribed screens this weekend. To celebrate this, let’s have a timely look at some of the comics that have poked fun at everyone’s favourite visually-impaired vigilante:

Marshal Law Takes Manhattan

Veteran British comics writer and Judge Dredd co-creator Pat Mills never cared too much for superheroes, so when he and fellow 2000ad alum Kev O’Neil created a comic for Marvel’s ‘mature readers’ Epic imprint in the mid-1980s they decided to really put the boot in. Set in a dystopian future where capes and superpowers are commonplace, the eponymous Marshal Law was a government-sanctioned “hero hunter” tasked with eliminating rogue superheroes. In Marshal Law Takes Manhattan, he encounters grotesque parodies of major Marvel superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America and – of course – Daredevil.

He’s not identified by name, but you can tell it’s Daredevil because he keeps running in the wrong direction and he wears a costume with horribly mismatching colours.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The TMNT comic series made its debut in 1983 and was originally a parody mash-up of the hottest comics of the time, including X-Men spin-off The New Mutants (which contained numerous teenage mutants) and Frank Miller’s seminal run on Daredevil (which featured lots of ninjas). Long before it influenced the Netflix show, Miller’s Daredevil was a big inspiration behind Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael – possibly more so than even the Italian Renaissance. For one thing, they shared an uncannily similar backstory to Ol’ Hornhead – in one version of the TMNT origin story, it was strongly hinted that the radioactive sludge that mutated our Heroes in a Half Shell came from the same truck that blinded young Matt Murdock. Both Daredevil and The Turtles were trained by wood-themed mentors (a man called ‘Stick’ and a rat called ‘Splinter’), and would often get into conflict with menacing appendage-themed ninja gangs (‘The Hand’ and ‘The Foot Clan’).

Maybe they’ll show up in season three.

Alan Moore’s Grit

Alan Moore is one of the world’s most respected and influential comics writers. He deconstructed the superhero genre with Watchmen, autopsied the Victorian era with his Jack the Ripper thriller, From Hell, and inspired a global protest movement’s wardrobe with V for Vendetta. Before any of that, however, he mercilessly ripped the piss out of Frank Miller-era Daredevil for shits and giggles.

Illustrated by Mike Collins, who seamlessly blends a faux Miller-esque art style with a Mad magazine-style superabundance of background gags, the strip originally appeared in Marvel UK’s 80s anthology monthly, The Daredevils. It’s a good example of Moore’s critically-underappreciated early, funny period.

What If?

Many of the these parodies focus on Frank Miller’s early-80s Daredevil work, which made his name in the industry and transformed Daredevil from a swashbuckling sub-par Spider-Man to the comics noir crimefighter that Netflix subscribers know and love. Miller was not averse to a Daredevil parody himself, though, as this one-page strip from Marvel’s classic alternative universe comic What If? proves:

Marvel/Art: Frank Miller

Granted, it’s not the best thing Miller’s ever done, but it’s damn sight better than some of his more recent work.

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https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699083/0/tomlennon~A-Lee-Majors-Christmas/feed/0https://www.tomlennon.com/queensway-the-hard-way/Queensway the Hard Wayhttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699085/0/tomlennon~Queensway-the-Hard-Way/
https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/595699085/0/tomlennon~Queensway-the-Hard-Way/#respondMon, 30 Nov 2015 17:41:07 +0000http://tomlennon.com/?p=5097Tall tale from the 1990's of how a broken down car in Birmingham's Queensway tunnel brought a once-great city to it's knees. Features cheap jokes and some last-minute innuendo.

On Friday evening, Birmingham city centre traffic ground to a halt after a car broke down in the city’s rather lengthy Queensway Tunnel. As you would expect, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the city’s motorists, with some of them taking to social media to declare it “insane”, “a bloody outrage”, and “the worst night of my life”, albeit with a lot more typos and exclamation marks.

Although traffic chaos can be frustrating, we should always try to put things like this into perspective. Wasn’t it the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu who once said “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”? Or maybe it was the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica… I do get confused.

I know they weren’t specifically talking about Birmingham’s Queensway Tunnel, but Lao-Tzu and the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica did have a point. This is not the first time a broken down car in this subterranean short cut has caused traffic chaos in Birmingham city centre, and it will not be the last. In fact, when I was in my twenties , a similar thing happened to me.

By similar, I mean I was once in a broken down car in the Queensway Tunnel that caused traffic chaos in Birmingham city centre.

This was a Saturday afternoon in 1998 or thereabouts, and I wanted to pick up a computer desk from Argus. I didn’t have a computer at the time – in fact, the last computer I had was the 48K ZX Spectrum I got for my fourteenth birthday – but I really wanted something a bit more swanky and up to date and firmly believed that the act of having a computer desk would help me manifest a reasonable desktop with internet access. After all, a computer desk without a computer would make the spare bedroom look stupid, and nobody wants that.

I didn’t have a car, but my good friend Phil did – an old Rover Metro that had seen better days, even by Rover Metro standards. Phil’s a smart, good-natured guy who shares my love for the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum. Interestingly enough, he spent so much time listening to Black Sabbath in his teens that by the time he reached his twenties he looked like a young Ozzy Osbourne. It’s a recognised medical condition known as “ozzmosis”.

Anyway, Phil picked me up from my home, and we headed into Birmingham city centre (or ‘town’, as we like to say around here). We made our way southbound along the A38, descending and ascending the bijou Snow Hill Tunnel without incident before plunging into the significantly longer Queensway tunnel.

The Queensway tunnel is just over half a kilometre in length, forming a big subterranean curve between Great Charles Street and what used to be Snobs nightclub. According to the indispensable Road Tunnel Operator Association website, the tunnel carries over 42,000 vehicles per day. According to personal experience, it also tends to get really busy on Saturday afternoons.

We were past the tunnel’s halfway point when the engine stopped and the car suddenly decelerated. “What’s happening?” I asked Phil, with panic pushing my voice up the octave range.

“I don’t know,” replied Phil, looking very scared.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I squealed.

“Don’t quote Star Wars at me,” growled Phil, hitting the hazard lights button and frantically turning the key in the ignition. “Not at a time like this.”

“I’m only trying to help, your worshipfulness.”

I’d hoped we would be able to limp out of the tunnel but that wasn’t meant to be. We’d just passed the end of the big curve, with the light at the end of the tunnel right ahead of us, when the car finally stopped. We hadn’t just broken down in Birmingham’s busiest tunnel, we’d broken down on a blind corner in a Birmingham’s busiest tunnel. This never happened to Lao Tzu or the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica.

As cars, buses, and Eddie Stobart trucks swerved out of the way and honked their horns aggressively at us I knew something had to be done. Younger readers may find this difficult to imagine, but Phil and I – like most people in those days – didn’t have mobile phones. Not even a Nokia. Back then this wasn’t all that uncommon, of course: it wasn’t until a Wednesday afternoon in late 2000 when everybody suddenly had a mobile phone.

“There’s a phone box next to Snobs,” I said, my voice now perilously close to a Bee Gees-like falsetto. “I’ll leg it there and call for help.”

“That’s crazy!” said Phil. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

“We’ll get ourselves killed sitting here!” I said.

“I’ve got RAC membership,” said Phil.

“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll call them.” I got out of the car and ran along the footpath-less tunnel, keeping as close to the wall as possible to avoid getting splattered. At one point my foot snagged on a random length of wire and I nearly tripped into the path of an oncoming vehicle. I think it was a Saab.

Eventually I made it out of the tunnel, legged it to the phone box, called the RAC, gave them Phil’s details and told them what had happened. The operator asked: “Do you have the member’s car registration number?”

Bollocks – I hadn’t thought of that.

I hung up and ran back down the Queensway tunnel (taking extra care to avoid tripping over any random lengths of wire), scribbled Phil’s registration number on the back of my hand, then ankled it back to the phone box, and called the RAC.

As I made my way back to the Queensway tunnel, sweating profusely and deeply knackered, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right: there were no vehicles coming out of the southbound lane.

Oh God, I thought, someone’s gone into the back of Phil’s car.

I ran as fast as I could, crossing a road that was – come to think of it – surprisingly traffic-free for a Saturday afternoon, and ran down the tunnel expecting to find a scene of utter devastation and fearing the worst for my dear friend.

Instead, I saw a police car parked alongside his Rover Metro, and two portly, middle-aged officers chatting to my pale and somewhat sheepish looking pal. It turned that a public-spirited person who actually had a mobile phone in 1998 drove by, witnessed our plight, and – after swerving out of the way – called the emergency services. The police sealed off the Queensway tunnel, making Birmingham city centre traffic ground to a halt.

“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”

The policemen were lovely chaps and the three of us pushed Phil’s car out of the Queensway tunnel. There was an awkward moment when one of the officer’s walkie-talkies fell out of its belt holster and shattered on the tarmac. For a moment I feared we’d be taken to Steelhouse Lane Police Station and cavity-searched out of spite, but that was just paranoia fuelled by the fact I’d just almost got deep-sixed by a Saab.

We pushed the car to a nearby street, parking it up outside a pub. “We need to phone the RAC,” said Phil. “Tell them where we are.”

“There’ll be a phone in here,” I said.

As we stumbled into the pub, a group of middle-aged white men stood at the bar and gave us a funny look. It was like that scene from An American Werewolf in London, where the two American hitchhikers get a frosty reception at a pub in the Yorkshire Dales. I don’t blame them, of course – Phil and I were pale, sweaty, and visibly shaking due to our recent near-death experience in the Queensway tunnel. I’d have probably given us a funny look, too.

The locals in this pub didn’t look like their movie counterparts, however. They looked more like Freddie Mercury. Really, seriously, and in the most literal sense imaginable: they all had moustaches, one wore a Live Aid muscle vest, while another sported his trademark yellow leather jacket. They might have been on their way to a convention, or maybe an audition for a tribute band. It might even have been a stag do. Whatever it was, Phil and I were in no fit shape to process it calmly or logically.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” said Phil.

And it wasn’t until many years later that the punchline finally crossed my mind: “Maybe that’s why they call it Queensway…”